Merchandising is crucial for FMCG and CPG companies, as well as all other major retailers, for a number of reasons. The main reason is inventory is the retailers biggest cost. It is fundamentally the most important financial asset to the business, and effective merchandising has a significant impact on the retail business because of this.

For a business to make sales, its products and services should be visible and displayed in an appealing manner, a process referred to as merchandising. Merchandising includes product display and packaging, as well as all the advertising techniques used to promote and sell goods to consumers. Some of the main objectives of merchandising are

– Increase Traffic and more customer foot falls

– Drive sales

– Better space management

To make sure that the company brand is represented in the best way possible at the point of sale, Each company manages an extensive field team that is responsible for maximizing sales in retail stores in the defined beat. Field team agents are responsibly for taking stock of company products; photographing promotional materials and stands in stores; taking note of service requests; ensuring the correct merchandising of products and getting feedback from store managers.

This requires field agents to collect large amounts of data from the defined route, including thousands of photographs. It is a daunting task to sort through all of the data received on any given day. The data management process usually involves trying to sort through dozens of photos after the reps returned from a day in the field, trying to figure out where photos were taken and by whom. In addition, the data collected is unstructured and difficult to sort, filter and search. Lastly, the constant copying, emailing and collation of data creates the potential for human error.

A company needs a system that would automate all of the data collection activities, organize the reps and save them time and money by eliminating unnecessary processes.

Managers and supervisors can configure new data collection forms on the fly so that new data gathering tasks can be created, scheduled, and executed by field agents within a matter of minutes. Each rep receives information on their duties for the day on the app. After a rep completes an activity, they send a confirmation to their manager via the app and managers can keep track of their activities. All data collected is structured so that it can be filtered, searched and organised to provide real time business insights.

Overall, the automation of data collection and merchandising activities has helps to save valuable time. The long process that accompanies sorting through data is been eliminated by creating a system that uploads everything sent from reps backend system. There is also no longer any uncertainty about which store a particular piece of data came from.

DNA’s merchandising module lets you-

– Plan merchandiser’s daily route

– Track store visits by using GPS location modules in the mobile app

– Shelf analysis and presenting analytics of store sales outs

– Capture competition merchandising and related data

– Enable merchandisers to refer to planograms to ensure visual merchandising is done as per plan.

To know more about how DNA could help streamline your distribution business, please click here.

The name “Mobien” symbolizes mobile enablement. Mobien develops disruptive mobility solutions that help organizations deploy enterprise mobile apps to help make their business process agile with an anytime, anywhere access.